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Two of America's biggest coal plants closed this month

302 points by ph0rque 7y ago

OrangeMango 7y ago
> And the coal plants still left in the US, many in places like Georgia and Indiana, have advantages ranging from a huge scale (a third larger than those shut down this month) to relatively recent design. Where in Indiana? https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/10/26/nipsco-announces-another-wind-farm-in-white-county/ https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/10/26/nipsco-announces-... > The Northern Indiana Public Service Co. plans to help add another wind farm to White County as part of its plan to move off coal by 2028, the company said Thursday. > It is the fourth wind farm NIPSCO announced this year. > Last year, NIPSCO announced that plan to accelerate the retirement of its remaining coal-fired generating facilities and replace them with less costly renewable energy sources, a move that could result in up to $4 billion in savings, it said. > It would also retire the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station (Units 14, 15, 17 and 18) in Wheatfield by 2023 and its Michigan City Generating Station (Unit 12) by 2028. It plans to retire all coal within the next 9 years.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  One should expect those retirement dates to move up as renewable penetration in Indiana/MISO grid continues. https://www.pv-tech.org/news/indiana-utility-eyes-2.6gw-of-wind-solar-storage-for-coal-retirements https://www.pv-tech.org/news/indiana-utility-eyes-2.6gw-of-w... (Indiana utility eyes 2.6GW of wind-solar-storage for coal retirements)
- keanebean86 7y ago
  The coal plant near where I was raised is being phased out around 2030. To be honest I've always been awed by it's size and presence. Such a huge chunk of concrete and steam. My grandpa helped built it back in the 80s. My grandma's front porch is supposedly made from the excess concrete. I got to take a tour of the outside 20 years ago and I was amazed by how massive everything looked. On the one hand I'm glad it won't be polluting anymore but it holds a special place in my childhood. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Power_Plant
- kortilla 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indiana#Coal-fired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indi...
dmtroyer 7y ago
good riddance.
w0mbat 7y ago
Coal is an environmental disaster. Burning it releases CO2, sulphur that causes acid rain, and surprising amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. In fact, coal power plants cause more radioactive contamination than nuclear power plants, and coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... Leave the coal in the ground.
- dmurray 7y ago
  > coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American. This isn't true in any reasonable sense, and SA retract the claim in a footnote. But nuclear plants produce so much less waste than coal plants that overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.
  - virgilp 7y ago
    > This isn't true in any reasonable sense, > overall, they release less radiation joule for joule. How is that not a "reasonable sense"? Less radiation joule per joule seems to me like a reasonable measure as "less radioactive overall"
    - dmurray 7y ago
      At the point where it's already waste, you don't really care about the energy that was produced from it, possibly years or thousands of years ago.
      - yongjik 7y ago
        If one power plant creates 1000t of waste, and another creates 10000t of waste while providing the same amount of electricity, I think we can reasonably say that the second generates 10x more waste. "Well, if you pick just one ton of waste from either plant it's the same waste!" is technically true, but it's neither here nor there. (Of course in case of nuclear vs. coal it's a bit more complicated because the waste products are not the same, but I still think we can reasonably compare waste per energy.)
spicymaki 7y ago
Good! the Luddites had a choice to transition their skill sets to renewable energy. They were warned, but they hemmed and hawed, and then they turned belligerent. They willfully choose to follow the pied pipers into unemployment.
- minikites 7y ago
  Arby's employs more people than the entire coal industry. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...
- OldFatCactus 7y ago
  I used to work at a coal plant. The skillsets(mechanic, electrician, boiler, welding, labor, tech) have plenty of overlap with other types of plants. Workers regularly transferred to hydro and nuclear plants when necessary or for better opportunities. The majority of workers will be fine if they're willing to move to another region. The co-op or owner will oftentimes pay for the move
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Below is a great example of a model to soften the blow to those impacted by these fossil generation closures. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/judge-oks-vistra-coal-plant-closure-settlement-seen-as-model-for-helping-im/567295/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/judge-oks-vistra-coal-plant... (Judge OKs $8.6M Vistra coal plant closure settlement seen by NGOs as model for helping impacted communities)
    - Causality1 7y ago
      Should we, though? Those communities have spent decades voting people into power on the basis of fueling their economic prosperity by poisoning the rest of us. We owe them nothing.
      - 7y ago
ticmasta 7y ago
>> It’s not climate regulations. It’s economics. In a simplified view this is true, but they are also irreducible; We'll never reach any meaningful action if we don't make it economically advantageous to pursue alternatives that "just so happen" to be climate positive. That would be akin to getting someone to exercise solely because "it's good for you". This is largely if not almost entirely caused by natural gas prices that make variable cost close to zero; it's essentially a waste product in producing oil for much of the country. The challenge is getting it from wellhead to consumer, but power plants are different than individual consumers. It powers more than a 1/3 currently (vs < 10% wind/solar) and for much of current coal is a very easy substitute. If we could ever get to on-site electricity generation (with the byproduct of heating homes and businesses) we could make huge reductions in pollution and gains in efficiency. Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons.
- sampo 7y ago
  > Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons. When more and more people will start to take the actuality of climate change seriously, either through education or – increasingly – from personal experience, nuclear will become more touchable.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I think the touchability of nuclear energy was quite negatively impacted by Fukushima, and it's just going to take a while to get reasonable people on board with the idea that that model of reactor was far out of date. There are the folks that just shout "No nukes ever" and they can't be won over, but we're got flat earthers and anti-vaxers, so not everybody can be reasonable.
    - thephyber 7y ago
      Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. They are rare but high impact ("black swan") events. Just like terrorism, it causes a strong imprint on the minds of some people which seemingly overpowers their ability to rationally weigh observed statistics and make balanced choices. I want to know why we can't even seem to build the few (2-3) which have started construction, but the projects are so massive that they constantly run over budget and behind timelines[1]. Until we fix that issue, I don't want the precious resources of PG&E's corpse to make risky bets on massive nuclear infra projects. It just seems like throwing lots of money at contractors who no longer know how to make massive projects on time or built to architectural spec. I would, however, like to see a lot more R&D on small, lower-temperature reactors, possibly ones that reuse spent fuel rods from larger traditional nuclear power reactors. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-project-canceled-in-south-carolina.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...
roenxi 7y ago
Ironically outcomes like this mostly vindicate the regressives. Any society who listened to the environmentalists; phased out fossil fuels and committed to renewables in the late 90s or 2000s would have shot themselves in the foot for nothing. The further renewables prices drop, the more foolish committing to them early looks. Gas prices is a different issue to that though.
- jayd16 7y ago
  We might have prevented a fair bit of environmental damage in that time, even if we're just talking spills from deep water rigs. Price drops come from scale so if we scaled sooner the prices might have dropped sooner. It's impossible to say for sure though.
- ohples 7y ago
  Wrong. People commiting to renewables early drive and support the market, which overtime drives down prices due to more and more people improving the tech and manufacturing process, which is what leads to the prices to come down.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Possibly that could have been done in a controlled and experimental fashion rather than condemning the infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more? Anyway the point stands. It isn't fair but the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did.
    - D_Alex 7y ago
      >infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more Citation needed. >the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did Even if this was true, it does not "vindicate the regressives". We can't all expect to be able to mooch off someone else all the time. It does vindicate those people who were calling for a tax on the externalities of fossil fuels though.
makomk 7y ago
I'm not sure it's climate regulations or economics that lead to this so much as it is fracking. While fracking has brought down natural gas prices in the US, as I understand it the big problem with switching from coal to gas absent fracking and horizontal drilling isn't just the price but the fact that there just wouldn't be enough of it.
- adventured 7y ago
  That's essentially correct, regarding the necessity of fracking to make natural gas able to have the impact that it has for the US. US natural gas production had not net moved higher from 1976 to 2006. Here's the boom from 2000 to 2013: https://i.imgur.com/S8Ky983.png https://i.imgur.com/S8Ky983.png You can see that it doesn't really move until 2007, when the fracking lift-off begins. Primarily Texas and Marcellus. From mid 2000 to 2009, natural gas prices in the US averaged around 100% to 150% higher than they are now. From 2003 to 2009, prices were essentially a minimum of 100% higher the entire time than they are right now. There simply wasn't enough supply to tame the demand impact, so prices got really crazy during the commodity bubble years in there. The long-term global NG demand chart is remarkable: https://i.imgur.com/0KLGshU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0KLGshU.jpg Russian natural gas production is now well over twice what it was in the mid 1970s. And Middle East natural gas production is something like seven times higher than it was just 25 years ago.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    The efficiency of natural gas fired power plants gas also increased greatly since 1976: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EUfITI3EGIE/UU-FK6Ise0I/AAAAAAAAAWY/56do3BPzQt0/s1600/MIT_Gas_Turbine_Efficiency.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EUfITI3EGIE/UU-FK6Ise0I/AAAAAAAAAW...
  - graycat 7y ago
    Okay, looked at the graph: Copied it to my system clipboard, read it into an old copy of Microsoft Photodraw, magnified it by 400% and THEN could read the axis annotation!!! The horizontal axis is time and goes from 1965 to 2017. The vertical axis is "global" natural gas volume demand in units of a billion cubic feet per day (at standard temperature and pressure, likely, hopefully). In 1965 the volume was about 60. In 2017 the volume was about 370. Between these two points, the graph went "up and to the right"! So, since 1965, the volume is up by a factor of about 6. Not wildly surprising. I grew up in west Tennessee, and the winter heat was from natural gas. Recently I returned to Tennessee, east Tennessee, and again the winter heat is from natural gas. Cozy!!! Between the two, I was long in NY with winter heat from fuel oil: Messy, had to have the furnace cleaned, and the oil was from a delivery truck -- botheration. Tennessee seems to do well on energy: There's the natural gas -- I have no idea where it comes from. There's TVA with hydropower from the Tennessee River. When demand for electric power grew, IIRC they used nuclear fission and coal. Maybe now they are using natural gas. Of course, in east Tennessee is Oak Ridge with a long history in energy generation and now supercomputers. I like Tennessee!
starik36 7y ago
I keep hearing about the impending demise of coal. How does anyone explain this. https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pdf https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pd... The production is actually slightly up.
- selectodude 7y ago
  Exports. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports...
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Yep. California stopped buying the electricity generated by the coal mines and coal power plants owned by the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico. The power plant shut down, but it's actually expanding its financial dependence on coal. It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia.
    - sriram_sun 7y ago
      > It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia. Wow! Fascinating. What has any of this got to do with governing the state of California?
- xboxnolifes 7y ago
  Your link shows coal production dropping 25% in the last 6 years. How is that slightly up?
  - starik36 7y ago
    I am using 2016 as my baseline since it's reasonably recent.
    - martinpw 7y ago
reaperducer 7y ago
While I think it's great that these big coal-fired power plants are going away, i never see anyone talking about the millions of homes in the United States (mostly in the northeast) that are heated by individual coal stoves and coal and oil furnaces. Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant. One of the environmental advantages of electric cars and other machines is a reduction in "point source" pollution. You can put huge scrubbers on a power plant that you can't on a million stoves or lawn mowers or whatever. Even when all of the coal power plants are gone, there's still another huge coal burning problem waiting to be tackled.
- romski 7y ago
  You’re talking about it. There, now “someone” is!
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Coal stoves in the Northeast -- how many of those are there? I know of quite a few places in RI and MA with oil heaters, though I'd wager natural gas is on in probably 50% of my network's residences.
  - slavapestov 7y ago
    Coal furnaces are common in rural areas where you might not even have a natural gas line.
    - Analemma_ 7y ago
      I looked this up and all I could find was [0], saying there are a small number of households using it in Pennsylvania. As for the rest of PA and New England, natural gas is the norm and I haven't heard of anyone using coal. Houses that don't have natural gas lines use storage tanks in the yard that are topped off by a delivery truck every couple months. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-heat-homes-with-coal-its-still-king https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...
dwd 7y ago
It does show how insignificant electric cars are in the mix of things, and counter productive (unless recharged off-grid) compared to putting Gov rebates and incentives into alternate generation that gets these plants offline as quickly as possible. Tesla (and other electric manufacturers) are years away from building 3.5 million cars for the US.
- reitzensteinm 7y ago
  EVs (including PHEVs) provide an instantly switchable dynamic demand, along the lines of 20% of total electricity use if the entire fleet were replaced. Then if you add on V2G, all of a sudden you can swing electricity demand +/- 20%. Combined with overprovisioning, this greatly mitigates the disadvantages of intermittent renewables. I don't really see how we get to 100% renewables without it, and it makes sense to pursue both simultaneously.
  - dwd 7y ago
    Yes, definitely pursue both. My point was more as far as where Gov funding should be prioritised given their relutance to throw funding at new generation and rely on market investment while providing incentives to buy electric vehicles - though for Telsa that will be gone soon enough. 2b would pay for ~3.4GW* of hydro, ~1.2GW* wind or ~700MW solar* but only subsidise 400k EVs (avg 5k tax credit per vehicle). * https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912
  - maliker 7y ago
    I work with electric utilities, and every time we talk with car manufacturers (including recently Tesla) they say vehicle-to-grid (v2g) isn't on the roadmap. On the other hand, almost all charging happens at night, which is a time of low demand on the grid. And delayed charging (combined with time-of-use rates) to move off of the 7 PM winter peaks is widely available. So even without v2g, vehicle electrification has worked out great on the grid so far.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
ranDOMscripts 7y ago
Good riddance to the Navajo plant. While it may have been providing some decent wage jobs on the reservation, it was otherwise despoiling the environment around a remarkable corner of the world.[0] [0]https://www.pagearizona.com/ https://www.pagearizona.com/
- fargle 7y ago
  So great and all that, but what about the jobs? And "despoiling", I've been there, it was fine. Beautiful. So was it really worth killing even more of our careers? Bet the earth "as a whole" is better now that Chinese coal and hydro plants are supplying the power to build our shiny new cheap solar panels.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Are you seriously saying that burning coal to build solar panels is not better than continuing to burn coal forever?
    - fargle 7y ago
      I'm seriously saying that burning coal isn't that much worse and not that much difference. People who think that solar is better are just fooling themselves. There is no free lunch and those solar panels are going to wear out, so it's not "forever" at all. And big ugly solar farms in the desert are just a different kind of "blight". It takes conservatively 4 years for a panel to generate as much energy as it took to manufacture. It takes even more for that container ship to move them here. They're supposed to last 20 years, but really can be as poor as 15 and they loose efficiency each year. So 1/3 to 1/2 of their lifetime is just plain wasted already which means the stated efficiency and economics are grossly overestimated. So yeah, I wouldn't build more coal plants either. Natural gas is like 1/3 the price of either solar or coal. But to applaud destroying existing infrastructure? And to shore that up with propaganda like "blight the landscape". That is naive and won't do anything to fix the basic problem. If we choose to be wasteful materialistic energy hogs, then we have to pay for it. So give up your house AC and your car and everything else that uses so much electricity first - then play that moral high road card. The problem isn't the supply source or even the choice of raw material. It's wanton greed and wastefulness of the consumers.
Proven 7y ago
Congrats. Did the cost of electric energy go up? Did various levels of government borrow even more money which they do not intend to pay back, and which will destroy millions of retirees and savers a few years down the road?
rossdavidh 7y ago
1) Surprising to the mainstream view even as recently as 2007, coal use globally has actually decreased in recent years, and mostly not due to any environmental regulation, but simply cost. 2) ...but surely, this cannot continue, and further decrease in coal will require environmental regulation. Uh, someone is not learning from what just happened. Renewables are on a decades long, Moore's Law-like exponential decline in cost per kilowatt-hour. Fracking has caused natural gas to decline in cost dramatically, and since the drop in oil prices has shown an ability to continually improve its cost structure; not so long ago it was thought that you needed $100/barrel oil for fracking to continue. There is no good reason to expect these trends to stop, especially the one for wind and solar, which have been going on for decades. We have, globally, passed Peak Coal, a few years back.

302 points by ph0rque 7y ago

> And the coal plants still left in the US, many in places like Georgia and Indiana, have advantages ranging from a huge scale (a third larger than those shut down this month) to relatively recent design. Where in Indiana? https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/10/26/nipsco-announces-another-wind-farm-in-white-county/ https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/10/26/nipsco-announces-... > The Northern Indiana Public Service Co. plans to help add another wind farm to White County as part of its plan to move off coal by 2028, the company said Thursday. > It is the fourth wind farm NIPSCO announced this year. > Last year, NIPSCO announced that plan to accelerate the retirement of its remaining coal-fired generating facilities and replace them with less costly renewable energy sources, a move that could result in up to $4 billion in savings, it said. > It would also retire the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station (Units 14, 15, 17 and 18) in Wheatfield by 2023 and its Michigan City Generating Station (Unit 12) by 2028. It plans to retire all coal within the next 9 years.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
One should expect those retirement dates to move up as renewable penetration in Indiana/MISO grid continues. https://www.pv-tech.org/news/indiana-utility-eyes-2.6gw-of-wind-solar-storage-for-coal-retirements https://www.pv-tech.org/news/indiana-utility-eyes-2.6gw-of-w... (Indiana utility eyes 2.6GW of wind-solar-storage for coal retirements)
keanebean86 7y ago
The coal plant near where I was raised is being phased out around 2030. To be honest I've always been awed by it's size and presence. Such a huge chunk of concrete and steam. My grandpa helped built it back in the 80s. My grandma's front porch is supposedly made from the excess concrete. I got to take a tour of the outside 20 years ago and I was amazed by how massive everything looked. On the one hand I'm glad it won't be polluting anymore but it holds a special place in my childhood. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Power_Plant
kortilla 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indiana#Coal-fired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indi...

dmtroyer 7y ago

good riddance.

w0mbat 7y ago

Coal is an environmental disaster. Burning it releases CO2, sulphur that causes acid rain, and surprising amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. In fact, coal power plants cause more radioactive contamination than nuclear power plants, and coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... Leave the coal in the ground.

dmurray 7y ago
> coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, says Scientific American. This isn't true in any reasonable sense, and SA retract the claim in a footnote. But nuclear plants produce so much less waste than coal plants that overall, they release less radiation joule for joule.
- virgilp 7y ago
  > This isn't true in any reasonable sense, > overall, they release less radiation joule for joule. How is that not a "reasonable sense"? Less radiation joule per joule seems to me like a reasonable measure as "less radioactive overall"
  - dmurray 7y ago
    At the point where it's already waste, you don't really care about the energy that was produced from it, possibly years or thousands of years ago.
    - yongjik 7y ago
      If one power plant creates 1000t of waste, and another creates 10000t of waste while providing the same amount of electricity, I think we can reasonably say that the second generates 10x more waste. "Well, if you pick just one ton of waste from either plant it's the same waste!" is technically true, but it's neither here nor there. (Of course in case of nuclear vs. coal it's a bit more complicated because the waste products are not the same, but I still think we can reasonably compare waste per energy.)

spicymaki 7y ago

Good! the Luddites had a choice to transition their skill sets to renewable energy. They were warned, but they hemmed and hawed, and then they turned belligerent. They willfully choose to follow the pied pipers into unemployment.

minikites 7y ago
Arby's employs more people than the entire coal industry. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...
OldFatCactus 7y ago
I used to work at a coal plant. The skillsets(mechanic, electrician, boiler, welding, labor, tech) have plenty of overlap with other types of plants. Workers regularly transferred to hydro and nuclear plants when necessary or for better opportunities. The majority of workers will be fine if they're willing to move to another region. The co-op or owner will oftentimes pay for the move
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Below is a great example of a model to soften the blow to those impacted by these fossil generation closures. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/judge-oks-vistra-coal-plant-closure-settlement-seen-as-model-for-helping-im/567295/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/judge-oks-vistra-coal-plant... (Judge OKs $8.6M Vistra coal plant closure settlement seen by NGOs as model for helping impacted communities)
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Should we, though? Those communities have spent decades voting people into power on the basis of fueling their economic prosperity by poisoning the rest of us. We owe them nothing.
    - 7y ago

ticmasta 7y ago

>> It’s not climate regulations. It’s economics. In a simplified view this is true, but they are also irreducible; We'll never reach any meaningful action if we don't make it economically advantageous to pursue alternatives that "just so happen" to be climate positive. That would be akin to getting someone to exercise solely because "it's good for you". This is largely if not almost entirely caused by natural gas prices that make variable cost close to zero; it's essentially a waste product in producing oil for much of the country. The challenge is getting it from wellhead to consumer, but power plants are different than individual consumers. It powers more than a 1/3 currently (vs < 10% wind/solar) and for much of current coal is a very easy substitute. If we could ever get to on-site electricity generation (with the byproduct of heating homes and businesses) we could make huge reductions in pollution and gains in efficiency. Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons.

sampo 7y ago
> Increased nuclear would be a big win for the environment as well but is a social-political untouchable for a variety of real and made-up reasons. When more and more people will start to take the actuality of climate change seriously, either through education or – increasingly – from personal experience, nuclear will become more touchable.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I think the touchability of nuclear energy was quite negatively impacted by Fukushima, and it's just going to take a while to get reasonable people on board with the idea that that model of reactor was far out of date. There are the folks that just shout "No nukes ever" and they can't be won over, but we're got flat earthers and anti-vaxers, so not everybody can be reasonable.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. They are rare but high impact ("black swan") events. Just like terrorism, it causes a strong imprint on the minds of some people which seemingly overpowers their ability to rationally weigh observed statistics and make balanced choices. I want to know why we can't even seem to build the few (2-3) which have started construction, but the projects are so massive that they constantly run over budget and behind timelines[1]. Until we fix that issue, I don't want the precious resources of PG&E's corpse to make risky bets on massive nuclear infra projects. It just seems like throwing lots of money at contractors who no longer know how to make massive projects on time or built to architectural spec. I would, however, like to see a lot more R&D on small, lower-temperature reactors, possibly ones that reuse spent fuel rods from larger traditional nuclear power reactors. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-project-canceled-in-south-carolina.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...

roenxi 7y ago

Ironically outcomes like this mostly vindicate the regressives. Any society who listened to the environmentalists; phased out fossil fuels and committed to renewables in the late 90s or 2000s would have shot themselves in the foot for nothing. The further renewables prices drop, the more foolish committing to them early looks. Gas prices is a different issue to that though.

jayd16 7y ago
We might have prevented a fair bit of environmental damage in that time, even if we're just talking spills from deep water rigs. Price drops come from scale so if we scaled sooner the prices might have dropped sooner. It's impossible to say for sure though.
ohples 7y ago
Wrong. People commiting to renewables early drive and support the market, which overtime drives down prices due to more and more people improving the tech and manufacturing process, which is what leads to the prices to come down.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Possibly that could have been done in a controlled and experimental fashion rather than condemning the infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more? Anyway the point stands. It isn't fair but the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did.
  - D_Alex 7y ago
    >infrastructure of entire countries to costing twice, thrice or more Citation needed. >the people who avoided being involved are going to be much, much better off than those that did Even if this was true, it does not "vindicate the regressives". We can't all expect to be able to mooch off someone else all the time. It does vindicate those people who were calling for a tax on the externalities of fossil fuels though.

makomk 7y ago

I'm not sure it's climate regulations or economics that lead to this so much as it is fracking. While fracking has brought down natural gas prices in the US, as I understand it the big problem with switching from coal to gas absent fracking and horizontal drilling isn't just the price but the fact that there just wouldn't be enough of it.

adventured 7y ago
That's essentially correct, regarding the necessity of fracking to make natural gas able to have the impact that it has for the US. US natural gas production had not net moved higher from 1976 to 2006. Here's the boom from 2000 to 2013: https://i.imgur.com/S8Ky983.png https://i.imgur.com/S8Ky983.png You can see that it doesn't really move until 2007, when the fracking lift-off begins. Primarily Texas and Marcellus. From mid 2000 to 2009, natural gas prices in the US averaged around 100% to 150% higher than they are now. From 2003 to 2009, prices were essentially a minimum of 100% higher the entire time than they are right now. There simply wasn't enough supply to tame the demand impact, so prices got really crazy during the commodity bubble years in there. The long-term global NG demand chart is remarkable: https://i.imgur.com/0KLGshU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0KLGshU.jpg Russian natural gas production is now well over twice what it was in the mid 1970s. And Middle East natural gas production is something like seven times higher than it was just 25 years ago.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  The efficiency of natural gas fired power plants gas also increased greatly since 1976: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EUfITI3EGIE/UU-FK6Ise0I/AAAAAAAAAWY/56do3BPzQt0/s1600/MIT_Gas_Turbine_Efficiency.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EUfITI3EGIE/UU-FK6Ise0I/AAAAAAAAAW...
- graycat 7y ago
  Okay, looked at the graph: Copied it to my system clipboard, read it into an old copy of Microsoft Photodraw, magnified it by 400% and THEN could read the axis annotation!!! The horizontal axis is time and goes from 1965 to 2017. The vertical axis is "global" natural gas volume demand in units of a billion cubic feet per day (at standard temperature and pressure, likely, hopefully). In 1965 the volume was about 60. In 2017 the volume was about 370. Between these two points, the graph went "up and to the right"! So, since 1965, the volume is up by a factor of about 6. Not wildly surprising. I grew up in west Tennessee, and the winter heat was from natural gas. Recently I returned to Tennessee, east Tennessee, and again the winter heat is from natural gas. Cozy!!! Between the two, I was long in NY with winter heat from fuel oil: Messy, had to have the furnace cleaned, and the oil was from a delivery truck -- botheration. Tennessee seems to do well on energy: There's the natural gas -- I have no idea where it comes from. There's TVA with hydropower from the Tennessee River. When demand for electric power grew, IIRC they used nuclear fission and coal. Maybe now they are using natural gas. Of course, in east Tennessee is Oak Ridge with a long history in energy generation and now supercomputers. I like Tennessee!

starik36 7y ago

I keep hearing about the impending demise of coal. How does anyone explain this. https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pdf https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t1p01p1.pd... The production is actually slightly up.

selectodude 7y ago
Exports. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/imports-and-exports...
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Yep. California stopped buying the electricity generated by the coal mines and coal power plants owned by the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico. The power plant shut down, but it's actually expanding its financial dependence on coal. It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia.
  - sriram_sun 7y ago
    > It recently bought two huge coal companies in Wyoming to send the coal to Asia. Wow! Fascinating. What has any of this got to do with governing the state of California?
xboxnolifes 7y ago
Your link shows coal production dropping 25% in the last 6 years. How is that slightly up?
- starik36 7y ago
  I am using 2016 as my baseline since it's reasonably recent.
  - martinpw 7y ago

reaperducer 7y ago

While I think it's great that these big coal-fired power plants are going away, i never see anyone talking about the millions of homes in the United States (mostly in the northeast) that are heated by individual coal stoves and coal and oil furnaces. Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant. One of the environmental advantages of electric cars and other machines is a reduction in "point source" pollution. You can put huge scrubbers on a power plant that you can't on a million stoves or lawn mowers or whatever. Even when all of the coal power plants are gone, there's still another huge coal burning problem waiting to be tackled.

romski 7y ago
You’re talking about it. There, now “someone” is!
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Coal stoves in the Northeast -- how many of those are there? I know of quite a few places in RI and MA with oil heaters, though I'd wager natural gas is on in probably 50% of my network's residences.
- slavapestov 7y ago
  Coal furnaces are common in rural areas where you might not even have a natural gas line.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    I looked this up and all I could find was [0], saying there are a small number of households using it in Pennsylvania. As for the rest of PA and New England, natural gas is the norm and I haven't heard of anyone using coal. Houses that don't have natural gas lines use storage tanks in the yard that are topped off by a delivery truck every couple months. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-heat-homes-with-coal-its-still-king https://www.npr.org/2019/03/03/699325560/for-the-few-who-hea...

dwd 7y ago

It does show how insignificant electric cars are in the mix of things, and counter productive (unless recharged off-grid) compared to putting Gov rebates and incentives into alternate generation that gets these plants offline as quickly as possible. Tesla (and other electric manufacturers) are years away from building 3.5 million cars for the US.

reitzensteinm 7y ago
EVs (including PHEVs) provide an instantly switchable dynamic demand, along the lines of 20% of total electricity use if the entire fleet were replaced. Then if you add on V2G, all of a sudden you can swing electricity demand +/- 20%. Combined with overprovisioning, this greatly mitigates the disadvantages of intermittent renewables. I don't really see how we get to 100% renewables without it, and it makes sense to pursue both simultaneously.
- dwd 7y ago
  Yes, definitely pursue both. My point was more as far as where Gov funding should be prioritised given their relutance to throw funding at new generation and rely on market investment while providing incentives to buy electric vehicles - though for Telsa that will be gone soon enough. 2b would pay for ~3.4GW* of hydro, ~1.2GW* wind or ~700MW solar* but only subsidise 400k EVs (avg 5k tax credit per vehicle). * https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31912
- maliker 7y ago
  I work with electric utilities, and every time we talk with car manufacturers (including recently Tesla) they say vehicle-to-grid (v2g) isn't on the roadmap. On the other hand, almost all charging happens at night, which is a time of low demand on the grid. And delayed charging (combined with time-of-use rates) to move off of the 7 PM winter peaks is widely available. So even without v2g, vehicle electrification has worked out great on the grid so far.
  - nicoburns 7y ago

ranDOMscripts 7y ago

Good riddance to the Navajo plant. While it may have been providing some decent wage jobs on the reservation, it was otherwise despoiling the environment around a remarkable corner of the world.[0] [0]https://www.pagearizona.com/ https://www.pagearizona.com/

fargle 7y ago
So great and all that, but what about the jobs? And "despoiling", I've been there, it was fine. Beautiful. So was it really worth killing even more of our careers? Bet the earth "as a whole" is better now that Chinese coal and hydro plants are supplying the power to build our shiny new cheap solar panels.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Are you seriously saying that burning coal to build solar panels is not better than continuing to burn coal forever?
  - fargle 7y ago
    I'm seriously saying that burning coal isn't that much worse and not that much difference. People who think that solar is better are just fooling themselves. There is no free lunch and those solar panels are going to wear out, so it's not "forever" at all. And big ugly solar farms in the desert are just a different kind of "blight". It takes conservatively 4 years for a panel to generate as much energy as it took to manufacture. It takes even more for that container ship to move them here. They're supposed to last 20 years, but really can be as poor as 15 and they loose efficiency each year. So 1/3 to 1/2 of their lifetime is just plain wasted already which means the stated efficiency and economics are grossly overestimated. So yeah, I wouldn't build more coal plants either. Natural gas is like 1/3 the price of either solar or coal. But to applaud destroying existing infrastructure? And to shore that up with propaganda like "blight the landscape". That is naive and won't do anything to fix the basic problem. If we choose to be wasteful materialistic energy hogs, then we have to pay for it. So give up your house AC and your car and everything else that uses so much electricity first - then play that moral high road card. The problem isn't the supply source or even the choice of raw material. It's wanton greed and wastefulness of the consumers.

Proven 7y ago

Congrats. Did the cost of electric energy go up? Did various levels of government borrow even more money which they do not intend to pay back, and which will destroy millions of retirees and savers a few years down the road?

rossdavidh 7y ago

1) Surprising to the mainstream view even as recently as 2007, coal use globally has actually decreased in recent years, and mostly not due to any environmental regulation, but simply cost. 2) ...but surely, this cannot continue, and further decrease in coal will require environmental regulation. Uh, someone is not learning from what just happened. Renewables are on a decades long, Moore's Law-like exponential decline in cost per kilowatt-hour. Fracking has caused natural gas to decline in cost dramatically, and since the drop in oil prices has shown an ability to continually improve its cost structure; not so long ago it was thought that you needed $100/barrel oil for fracking to continue. There is no good reason to expect these trends to stop, especially the one for wind and solar, which have been going on for decades. We have, globally, passed Peak Coal, a few years back.